For many people the worst day of the week is Monday, it is the change from the weekend break to what becomes a work week.
It is the change from rest to activity, the change from leisure to obligation.
Undoubtedly, this is implicitly true for all of us who have a permanent job, that is, for 78% of the economically active population, which requires paid work with a specific schedule or period of time.
Under this paradigm, working time is the same as time of paid remuneration, so we would have to look for the fact that the more we work, the more money we will receive.
This last statement is not necessarily true, since there is evidence from many countries where working time is shorter than others and remuneration is higher. What is the difference?
The main reason for this disparity is productivity, that element that makes people efficient, effective and that their time becomes valuable, that the time invested in generating value is optimized so that the tangible or intangible production of that person is abundant.
Although it may sound pretentious, and this does not take into account the difficulties that many people face every day, everything can change with a shift in mentality and how we see things.
Here are the key points to make that change in mentality change the way we start each Monday
To have a better Monday you have to:
Plan your week with intention
Return that planning and its activities into habits
Plan the effort accompanied by the proportional reward
Be better every day with intentional marginal increases
Start something with intention
Our dopamine levels, or the substance that causes the feeling of satisfaction in our body, rises when we buy something new, start a new venture or simply have the expectation that something is going to start .
However, when we start a week, it does not have the same intention as New Year’s Day or our birthday, and this is because it lacks something key, we do not have a clear intention of what we are going to do that week .
Key point: Goals are processes, where step by step you reach a particular point. A one-year goal is achieved with small goals every 6 months, and that goal every 3 months, 1 month, 15 days, 1 week, and day by day.
Each week we must keep in mind the goals we want to achieve for that week, in our work, in our person, with our family or even as a contribution to our society.
That something new makes us get up on Monday morning with intention, with the idea of doing something in particular that we know will have a benefit, something new that we know will generate dopamine in the expectation of starting it.
Habits are achieved with repetition
Doing something with intention must be accompanied by a process of generating habits, since each of us is what we repeatedly do. This is nothing more than a representation of our habits.
We all know people, who are athletes, musicians, businessmen, and an endless number of labels that we can put on each one of the people.
Each of these labels are a symbol of the habits and repetitions of this person.
Starting a week with intention is a matter of habits, habits that are carried out the day before starting our activities, such as rituals, ceremonies or simply spaces in our agenda.
- Visualization of what we want to achieve in the next week or period of time.
- What activities do we have to do to achieve each of these milestones?
- Break each activity down into smaller steps
- Record each of the small activities on paper, in a task management system or on a calendar.
- A plan to review the objectives, the process and the plan that we must execute on a daily basis.
Reward is key to motivation, intention and habit formation.
In the same way that we must detail what we want to achieve, we must identify what it is that generates happiness, those aspects that we know will give that extra motivation.
It is key in the formation of habits that the reward for the creation of the habit is well identified, it can be watching a movie, you can go to a specific place or buy something that contributes to the realization of such habit.
We have to keep in mind that this identification of steps, performance, evaluation and reward, has to be frequent and consistent. The keyword in habit formation is consistency.
During this process, it is always important to identify the reward and tie it to the milestone of completing our habits. It is likely that we are going to seek the reward anyway.
The habit first then reward mentality is key to our personal fulfillment, because over time, the more ambitious the habit will be and greater the reward.
The longest path begins with the first step
And the most important thing is to continue with the second, the third and so on. The progress mindset is based on process, not destination.
The biggest challenge is to be a better version tomorrow than we are today, and that is achieved with what is called marginal improvements.
If we want to be runners, we don’t need to run a marathon tomorrow to be better than yesterday, just run 100 meters more every day than you ran the day before.
If I want to be a world-class chef, you must study and gain more learning than you did yesterday, and more hours in the kitchen trying, wasting, and having small successes.
Novak Djokovic, the number 1 tennis player in the world as of 2021, achieved this with a simple but complicated marginal change.
His percentage of points won in the year, before being within the world top 3 was 49%, currently it is 54%.
This is a marginal increase of 5%, this increase made the difference between being an average tennis player to being one of the best in history.
You have to know how to love the process and understand that the process is step by step.
To have a better Monday you have to:
Plan your week with intention
Turn that planning and your activities into habits
Plan the effort accompanied by the proportional reward
Be better every day with intentional marginal increases
